The University of Dayton College Republicans released a press release on Thursday that came out against H-1B program abuse.
“Students born in America who pay large sums of money to gain a degree for a specific career field should not have to compete with imported foreign labor that companies can pay less,” the student organization said.
The federal government has a cap of 85,000 foreign workers for this program.
“H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability,” the Department of Labor website says.
The college organization said it released this statement after “the past several days” have been “dominated by recent calls from some conservative and Republicans, most notably the recently announced DOGE chiefs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to remove country caps for H-1B visas, among other expansions of the H-1B system.”
According to a report from Electrek, Musk-owned Tesla laid off American workers and replaced them with H-1B workers.
“H1Bs, along with most other work-related visa programs are heavily used by large companies as a means by which they can bypass the standards that domestic job-seekers require, including good pay and good quality of work, allowing those companies to save money at the expense of said American job-seekers,” the group said.
Also, the college Republicans asked President-elect Donald Trump “to oppose abolishing country caps for H-1Bs and keep America’s next generation of job-seekers in mind while making economic decisions.”
Dayton is in Ohio, where 1,185 employers in the state sponsored 6,490 H-1B workers in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024. FY 2024 went from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024.
In FY 2014, 1,051 Ohio employers used the H-1B worker program to bring in 4,952 foreign workers.
During these 10 years, Ohio employers have used the H-1B program by an increase of 32.4 percent.
According to a study done by the Economic Policy Institute, 60 percent of H-1B workers were “assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation.”
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at zschmidt1717@gmail.com. Follow Zachery on Twitter @zacheryschmidt2.
